Quote Originally Posted by Ducatista
Anyone that buys a house near a river or on the same level as a river knowing that floods are becoming more common needs their head tested.
I'd agree, but what about people that make a sensible decision and find the council let them down or the builders leave blocked drains or simply too much rain in their area?

I am all for people having to take personal responsibility for their decisions (more than most) but not everything that happens is foreseeable or the result of a bad decision - life simply isnt' that black and white.

It really doesn''t help anyone to say that people are responsible for the situations they find themselves in. Sometimes they are, sometimes their not.
That's because you are looking at it from a reasonable point of view, with some compassion for others in difficulty. You have to look at it from Swanny's point of view, which appears to be more along the lines of "as long as I'm alright, f**k everyone else", which would apparently also include his family and friends as well as general members of the public. I don't agree with that point of view personally, my grandparents have had their homes modified to enable them to stay in their own homes, I know he doesn't think that the tax payer should fund that, but that's because he can't see beyond his own selfishness. During the war my grandmother was a land army girl, one grandfather was part of the 3rd wave to hit Normandy beaches on D-day and his job was to take ammunition's and grenades from dead and dying soldiers to feed the front line, my other grandfather was in the SAS. He was dropped behind enemy lines to knock out supply depots and other targets, when the war finished he was sent ahead of the rest of our troops to ensure that all remaining German troops where captured or 'neutralised' and it was his unit that came across the concentration camps before everyone else, he said you can tell when you're approaching one of those camps a week before you found it because of the smell of death in the air even if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction. I can't begin to imagine what horrors they witnessed during their service.

I am sure to reasonable people wold agree that we should do everything we can to help people like my grandparents, when you consider what they have done for us. I guess not everyone is that reasonable, and couldn't care less what happened to these people. Of course should Swanny ever need these services and isn't in a position to afford them, I doubt very much he would refuse them if the state offered them to him. Having a "f**k everyone else attitude" is all well and good, but very few of the people that have that attitude will stick by their morals and principles when it's their turn to need help.

His arguments are easy to pick apart, hence the lack of response to my other points, because his argument doesn't stand up to rational debate.